Page 52 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

It’s late when the house finally sleeps — dinner ran long, and Teddy required all the voices plus an encore.

When it’s just us, Gus doesn’t head for the stairs. He fills two glasses of water, sets one at my place at the table — my chair, the far side — and sits down across from it. We’re not going up yet, then. Good. There’s a conversation with my name on it, and it lives at this table.

“Margot got her turn at the door,” he says. “I’d like mine.”

“Take it. Take a long one if you need it.”

“It’s three sentences.” He puts one hand flat on the wood, where mine were on Friday. “You broke it, June. We said together — at this table, twelve hours before you left — and you decided alone, in the dark, for both of us. That’s the first sentence, and I need you not to argue with it.”

“I’m not arguing with it.”

“Second.” His voice stays level, which is how I know how hard this is for him. “I watched Margot walk into that school on Monday because she refused not to. It was a hard day for her, and she came home whole, and Tuesday she did the braid alone and messed up the back herself. The thing you left to prevent happened anyway, June. Smaller than you feared, and survivable, and hers to be proud of. Your reasons were real. The plan you built on them was still wrong. Both of those are true, and I’m not letting either one pretend to be the other.”

I take it straight, without flinching, the way I made myself take Margot’s version.

“And the third sentence?”

His hand turns over on the wood. Palm up. Open, not reaching — the same hand from Friday, asking the same plain way. “The reports weren’t patience. I want that at this table too. Every night I typed all fine to a number that never answered. And every night, some part of me was a man in a chair again, waiting on a woman who vanished. I’ve done that twice now. I don’t have a third one in me.” He breathes. “So. Next time things get bad — and there’s a board meeting Tuesday, so they’ll get bad by Tuesday — you can leave the room. You can leave the house. You can hand me the kids and go scream at the water. But you make the decision here, in front of me, where I get to argue. That’s the whole ask.”

“I told Margot I’d probably do it again and be wrong again,” I say, because he deserves at least the same honesty. “So I won’t promise you a version of me that doesn’t run the numbers. Here’s what I can promise. I will never again decide for you in the dark. I’ll say it to your face, at this table, where you can argue. Even when I’m sure I’m right.” I put my hand in his open one. “Especially then.”

His fingers close. “Deal,” he says. And then, because we are who we are: “Noted.”

Gus and I climb the stairs together, no sneaking, both of us stepping square on the loud fourth stair, because there’s no one left to hide from.

What happens in his room that night is slow because we’re wrung out, and gentle because everything still aches. Neither of us can stop the other from laughing at the wrong moments. My feet are freezing, his shirt has too many buttons, and we’re both crying a little and blaming the other one for starting it. He undresses me like unwrapping something returned in the mail against all odds, stopping to kiss each place as it appears. My shoulder. The mole. The inside of my wrist. And the whole time he’s saying quiet ridiculous things against my skin — the house didn’t work right, the coffee was wrong, Brenda wouldn’t perform. I get his shirt off and put my palm flat over his heart, and it’s going hard. He covers my hand with his and holds it there and just breathes for a while, eyes shut, making sure I’m real.

“You’re here,” he says, once, to the ceiling. Not a question.

“I’m here. You’re crying.”

“You first.” Neither of us concedes the point. It ends in a tie.

When he finally slides into me we both go completely still, my face against his, and the stillness lasts longer than moving does some nights. Then we rock together slowly, unhurried, wrapped tight, his hand cradling the back of my head, my heel hooked behind his knee. We say each other’s names at whisper volume for no reason except that we can. He moves in me slow and deep, one hand under my hip tilting me into him. The build is deep and quiet and certain, coming up from the inside out, warm and enormous and unhurried. I come apart first with my face in his neck, one long soft wave with more gratitude in it than fire. He follows me down with a shudder and my name, both arms wrapped around all of me, holding on tight.

Relief. That’s the whole night. Relief with skin on it.

After, I lie on his chest, and before I even notice, my finger is back at its old habit on his sternum — words he’s never asked about, traced where he can’t see them.

“June.” His voice in the dark, rumbling under my ear. “Fourteen months of messages and six months of watching you do that. Am I ever getting told what you write?”

I lift my finger. Then I put it back, and this time I write it slowly, in letters the size of my hand, one at a time. There’s no version of him that misses it.

I. L-O-V-E. Y-O-U.

His chest goes still under my hand. The furnace clicks on somewhere below us, right on time.

“Since when?” he asks, barely.

“Since before I knew your name. Which is a very strange sentence, and both of us know exactly what it means.”

He rolls me over gently and looks down at me in the dark. And he says it back plainly — no podium, an audience of one.

“I love you, June. Both of— no.” He catches himself, and I watch him put that old line away for good. “Just you. There’s only ever been one of you. It took me a year and a half to learn that, and I plan to spend the rest of my life saying it.”

Downstairs, Brenda grinds, and delivers, and rests. Everybody’s home.

Epilogue